Last chance to pre-order Carousel!

Carousel is officially out next Friday, 4th October. So if you haven't pre-ordered yet, now is the time! You'll get the album before everyone else, and also get the bonus track "Fighting to Survive" as a free download!

And from my point of view, all pre-orders count as week-one sales, so it could help me get in the charts again!

So if you haven't yet, please head here to pre-order the album!

Speaking of Carousel, I recently did an interview with Say It With Garage Flowers about the record, which you can read here!

There was a chunk during the Tom Petty question which was cut for length — that's entirely the interviewer's prerogative, I'm not offended! — that I thought might be interesting to share here too.

The other thing [about Tom Petty] probably goes back to The Whybirds days. I think Dave Banks had always been a fan, I’m pretty sure Full Moon Fever was one of his first albums. Not totally sure about Ben (Haswell), but I know he liked him. But Taff Thatcher and I especially got into him around 2007/8, whenever the Runnin’ Down a Dream film came out. Both of us were single while the other guys had partners, and we’d watch that thing all the time. Not always together either, sometimes we’d both be in our respective places on a Friday night getting pissed alone but texting each other where we were in the film and stuff.

Then once we had a showcase for George Drakoulias, who is a legendary music industry figure anyway, but he worked with Petty quite a bit. It was just him and us in a London rehearsal room. We thought it was going to be our big break. I remember Taff and I were so excited, I picked him up in the car the day before to chat about it and listen to Petty, and we drove up the A1 until we got to the Midlands somewhere and decided we’d better turn back.

Obviously, nothing came of the showcase. We played for a couple of hours at concert-level volume with him sitting just a few feet away on a couch. He seemed to like the music — I guess he wouldn’t allow his ears to be blown off if he didn’t! — and at the end said how he didn’t really work in A&R anymore, but if we came to LA he’d see what he could do. Moving to LA wasn’t really on the cards. C’est la vie.